Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins

If you imagined the Wii U’s excellent Lego City Undercover and the Nintendo 3DS’s Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins as actor siblings, the former would be Alec Baldwin to the latter’s Daniel.

Not Stephen, and not even William.

Daniel.

Point being, rational folk will undoubtedly prefer the original Lego City Undercover to the just-launched prequel, which looks similar and tries hard to live up to its predecessor but is clearly inferior in just about every way imaginable.

I’ll admit it might seem a little unfair to compare a handheld game to one made for consoles – especially when they aren’t really the same game.

The Chase Begins takes place prior to events in Lego City Undercover, which saw Lego mini-figure cop Chase McCain returning to the big metropolis of Lego City after some time away to find the place in dire need of his dogged determinedness to bring villains to justice. In the prequel he’s just a rookie cop who starts off pulling donut duty and chasing down lost dogs.

But it isn’t long before he starts earning his shield.

Chase finds out that everyone from farmers to astronauts are being strong-armed by a loosely connected gang of hoodlums, and he seems to be the only one with the wherewithal and gumption to take them all down. Classic cop stuff.

Thus, the stage is set for a series of missions that take the yellow-hued hero from the city’s construction yards to its island prison, each one earning our little plastic protagonist a new undercover outfit and, along with it, a fresh ability or two.

So, technically, it’s a different game. New missions and new bad guys, etc.

But it’s set in the same city. It stars many of the same characters. And it has the same basic mix of exploration, discovery, and scripted missions.

It desperately wants to be — or at the very least live up to — Lego City Undercover.

But it fails. Sometimes just a bit. Sometimes miserably.

In fact, its second-rate-ness is noticeable as soon as you begin moving around.

The 3DS’s lack of a second analogue stick means players are forced to either rely on the computer to control the camera or use the shoulder buttons to rotate it on a horizontal plane in agonizingly slow fashion. This is a pretty big concern for an open-world sandbox game with 360 degrees of action.

But a less-than-ideal interface may be the least of this game’s problems. A more pressing concern is its lack of diverse and compelling play.

Missions are largely composed of simple fetch or fix scenarios. You’ll need to find chicken eggs and repair satellite dishes, collect radioactive Lego studs and fix power boxes. There’s little in the way of any real puzzle solving or investigation. It’s just a matter of locating the objective icons on your mini-map, traveling to highlighted location, and doing whatever needs to be done there.

Too often, what needs to be done is fighting.

Combat was perhaps the least memorable part of Lego City Undercover, and yet it’s been made one of the primary elements of the 3DS prequel. Mediocre melee battles with cookie cutter thugs seem to pop up every few minutes. Every fight plays out in almost identical fashion: a couple of button taps to throw a suspect down, another to cuff him. It grows tedious quickly.

The battles might be more palatable if they were interspersed with a little mirth, but the story is essentially humourless.

Lacking the specific movie tie-ins of previous Lego adventures, the Wii U game traded heavily in parodies and references to a variety of popular films, often with genuinely funny results.

That’s not the case here.

The Chase Begins offers up the occasional pop culture riff – I caught one early on to do with TheSix Million Dollar Man – but they’re brief and without verve.

Plus, spoken dialogue – another strength of the Wii U game – is rare and fleeting. Most characters speak in text, even when Chase uses his police scanner’s ability to hear through walls and doors.

I’m not sure I even smiled while playing — much less giggled aloud, as I frequently did during Lego City Undercover.

Sadly, there’s precious little to do outside of the lame story missions.

You’ll use binocular stands to frame and snap picture postcards of pretty vistas, find the occasional collectible token representing other Lego mini-figures, and track down super bricks so you can build a car jump here or a helicopter pad there.

There’s really not much more to do than that.

In contrast, I spent almost all of my time in Lego City Undercover searching every nook and cranny of the game’s vast plastic metropolis in search of hidden delights and surprises. The drive to explore and discover was a primary draw. Here exploration feels more like a chore with rewards that hardly justify the effort.

It doesn’t help that the city has been chopped into neighbourhood-sized bits, each covered in a deep white fog that obscures anything more than a few blocks away. The sense of scope is limited, if not completely ruined.

Worse, many of these discrete areas are inaccessible to start, limiting the appeal of exploration even further. Passing between neighbourhoods requires one to endure a ponderous loading screen – and loss of current mission progress.

I’m gnashing my teeth all over again just typing that.

Kids — bless their easily satisfied little souls — are intrinsically less critical of entertainment media than their old, jaded parents. Consequently, they’ll probably warm more easily to The Chase Begins than I did.

I passed my copy off to my seven-year-old daughter for a while and she informed me she thought it was okay (though, having spent considerable time with the Wii U game, she wondered aloud: “Why does it look so cheap?”).

But a lot of older players have become fans of TT Games’ Lego adventures over the years, and this one just doesn’t have the zip, charm, and cleverness many teens and adults have come to expect from the series.

Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is a step back for the franchise, and a letdown for a brand that has, in recent years, found nearly as much adoration from parents as their kids. If you absolutely need to play a Lego City game, best pony up for a Wii U and pick up a copy of the original Lego City Undercover.